Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Nickel Boys, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma and Repression
Unity, Support, and Hope
History, Secrecy, and Racism
Civil Rights, Dignity, and Sacrifice
Power, Fear, and Upward Mobility
Summary
Analysis
Upon Elwood’s release from the infirmary, he resumes his work on the yard crew. He also approaches Mr. Goodall and asks once more for challenging coursework. Mr. Goodall enthusiastically agrees, but Elwood understands that nothing will come of this conversation. He then begins to wonder if Spencer heard that he had asked to be challenged and subsequently punished him more than the others to discourage him from acting superior. However, he then begins to sense that there is nothing informing Nickel’s system of violent punishment—nothing but hatred and aggression. With this in mind, he asks his peers how a person can get enough points to graduate early, but he learns little from their answers. Demerits, it seems, can rain down on a person at any moment.
As Elwood tries to find out how best to earn points, it becomes clear that Nickel’s hierarchal system is quite flawed. The fact that a student might earn demerits at any moment is discouraging, but meanwhile, the general promise of graduating early keeps students from openly rebelling, instilling in them a false sense of possibility. By creating an illusion of upward mobility, then, the institution further manipulates its students into submission.
Themes
Knowing that it’s extremely difficult to graduate from Nickel, Elwood sets a goal for himself, deciding to earn enough points by June. Upon leaving Nickel, he plans to work for the summer so that he can save up enough money to go to college, since he and his grandmother spent all of his savings on hiring a lawyer. This is not an ideal situation, he understands, but it will only be a short setback if he manages to graduate early, as if he simply missed one year of school.
Even though it’s rather apparent that Nickel’s points system is flawed, Elwood commits himself to graduating early. Once again, then, readers see his belief that hard work leads to progress—a belief that seemingly sustains itself even in the discouraging environment of Nickel Academy.
Themes
Several days later, Elwood receives a new work assignment. Reporting to the warehouse, he sees Turner with a young white staffer named Harper. Harper is the head of the school’s Community Service initiative. After saying that Elwood will fit the job, Harper tells both boys to get into a van, which, to Elwood’s great surprise, he then drives off campus. On the way out, Turner explains that the Community Service detail requires two trustworthy students, and that he recommended Elwood after his former partner graduated, promising that Elwood could keep quiet about what they do (an apparent requirement to be on the Community Service team). Harper is quite familiar with Nickel, since his mother worked at the school as a secretary. Having grown up around the students, Harper feels as if people like Elwood and Turner are just like him, except that they’ve been unlucky.
The Community Service work detail is shrouded in mystery, adding to the school’s strangely secretive nature. The less the students know about day-to-day operations, the more powerful the administration seems to them. Now, though, Elwood has been let in on a certain secret, though he doesn’t yet know what—exactly—that secret is, other than that he and Turner get to leave campus. Harper’s comment about the students’ bad luck also indicates that he might feel some empathy for them in a way that the other staff members don’t.
Themes
On Elwood’s first day on the Community Service team, he, Turner, and Harper go around the town of Eleanor unloading food and various supplies to local shops. These are goods that the government sends to Nickel, but the Nickel administration skimps on what it actually gives to the students, selling the rest to stores in the surrounding area to make a profit. At the end of the day, Harper drives to the house of one of Nickel’s powerful board members, where Elwood and Turner are instructed to paint a gazebo. Wanting to pay a visit to his girlfriend, Harper leaves them there, which the boys thoroughly enjoy. Although they’re doing shady work for the school, they like the freedom that comes along with being on the Community Service team, and Elwood finds it refreshing to be around Harper, a white staff member who treats him like something of an equal.
In this section, Elwood enjoys a small sense of liberation. By working on a secret assignment, he suddenly gains freedoms he wouldn’t encounter if he had stayed on campus. However, it’s worth noting that the deliveries he, Turner, and Harper make are ethically dubious, since the supplies they sell are intended to be used at Nickel Academy. In this way, Elwood is forced to help the school—his very own oppressor—benefit in shady ways, something that no doubt goes against this moral compass. At this point, though, there’s seemingly nothing he can do about this.
Themes
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While Elwood and Turner paint the gazebo, Turner tells Elwood that this is his second stay at Nickel. He doesn’t say why he was originally sent to the school, but he explains the circumstances surrounding his second punishment. He was, he tells Elwood, a pinsetter at a bowling alley. Each night, he fraternized with the white customers, laughing and joking with them in a jovial manner. While taking a break one night, though, he spoke to an old black man who worked in the kitchen. Having watched Turner acting so friendly toward the customers, this cook chastised him for pandering to white people, saying that Turner must not have any “self-respect.”
Turner’s apparent lack of “self-respect” recalls Elwood’s desire to cultivate a “sense of dignity,” an idea he drew from listening to Martin Luther King At Zion Hill. Although Turner is only trying to be a good employee, he ends up appealing to white people who most likely harbor racist ideas. In this way, his attempt to do a good job as a pinsetter causes him to degrade himself, ultimately putting him in a difficult position. Like Elwood, Turner has struggled with reconciling his personal goals and value with the racist society in which he lives.
Themes
Turner explains that he was so bothered by what his coworker said that he stopped being friendly to the customers. In fact, he started making fun of them as they played. This led to an altercation with an angry white man, and though Turner escaped unharmed, he threw a cinderblock through the man’s windshield when he saw his car parked outside the bowling alley a week later. Shortly thereafter, the police came for him.
Turner’s experience at the bowling alley is worth noting, since he doesn’t have very many options—either he continues to degrade himself by placating his white customers, or he upsets them and thus presents himself as a bad worker. Needless to say, he chooses the latter, and when this leads to an altercation, he gets so fed up that he takes his anger out on his aggressor’s car, an ill-advised decision that underlines just how much stress such situations can put on a person.
Themes
When Elwood and Turner finish their work for the day, Harper picks them up. On the way home, Elwood tries to commit everything about the outside world to memory. He also decides to keep a list of everything they deliver to people in town, documenting Nickel Academy’s unlawful practices in a notebook.
Given Elwood’s strong sense of morality, it’s rather unsurprising that he keeps a list of Nickel’s unlawful deliveries. This list, it seems, is the only way he can take a stand against the institution’s unethical practices without putting himself in immediate danger, though the mere existence of such a list does pose a threat to his wellbeing, since a staff member might find it and punish him as a result. Still, this doesn’t deter him, suggesting that he cannot be intimidated by Nickel’s culture of fear and continues to prioritize his own “sense of dignity.”
Themes
